Best selling and award- winning crime author Andrea Mara told David Hennessy about her latest novel, Such A Nice Girl and seeing her previous book All Her Fault turned into a major series.
Such A Nice Girl is the new psychological thriller from No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller Andrea Mara.
The morning after a luxury wedding, Siobhan and Grace discover their young adult children Re and Luna are missing.
The pool house they were staying in is a mess and what looks like blood is on the floor.
Things take an even more sinister turn when guards reveal an emergency call was made in the middle of the night. Although it is unclear which girl is speaking, they say they are scared of the other who has a knife so Siobhan and Grace are left with uncomfortable questions, Is one of their girls capable of something terrible? Who is the culprit and who is the victim?
Andrea Mara’s books have sold one million copies across all formats.
The TV adaptation of her 2021 book All Her Fault aired in November last year to great acclaim with Sarah Snook (Succession) in the lead role.
The supporting cast included Jake Lacy (White Lotus), Dakota Fanning and Michael Peña.
All Her Fault became the most watched show in America the first week of its release.
It has been announced since our interview that Such a Nice Girl is set to become a TV series produced by the same company that made All Her Fault into such a successful series.
Her previous novel It Should Have Been You won Irish Crime Novel of the Year at the 2025 An Post Book Awards. It was also a No.1 bestseller in Ireland for six weeks and a top 10 Sunday Times bestseller in the UK.
No One Saw a Thing was a Sunday Times number one bestseller and has sold over half a million copies.
Andrea took time to chat to the Irish World about the new book.
I really enjoyed the book, I understand the story came from a very real anxiety you have felt..
“Yeah, a lot of my books are based on actual real concrete tangible events like All Her Fault was inspired by when I went to collect my daughter from a play date and she wasn’t there.
“But with Such A Nice Girl rather than being one particular concrete event, it’s the general anxiety of back when my kids were very small and they were in creche or in nursery and I would go to collect them and I get called over by the manager and they go, ‘Oh, there’s been a little incident’ and your heart would sink, and then the manager would say, ‘And it was a biting incident’ and then your heart would sink a bit more.
“And my immediate thought, for better or worse, was, ‘Oh God, I hope my child wasn’t going around biting other people’s children’ which by default means I was kind of wishing my child was the one who was bitten.
“It sounds terrible and I would feel guilty about it but at the same time, nobody really wants to be the parent of the child who’s going around terrorising everybody else.
“That’s where it came from really.”
That is something the book deals with, the family of perpetrators who often don’t get a thought..
“Yeah, I was fascinated by that because the focus very correctly when there are crimes should be absolutely on the victims, of course it should and we know that in reality very often the focus is always on the perpetrator because we’re fascinated by what made this person do this thing.
“We’re shocked, we kind of need to rationalise it in some way but I would often think about the families of the perpetrator and how difficult that must be because you’ve got a perfectly nice normal family who did their best, really loved their child and then that child turns into an adult who does something horrific to another person.
“I just often thought, ‘What must it be like then for that family?’ because they lose everything too.
“Their adult child is perhaps in prison.
“They’re wondering where they went wrong.
“They have still got to live in their neighbourhood and see their neighbours and go to the shops.
“It’s clearly, of course, not the most important thing in any given crime situation but I am curious about what that is like for those families.
“It’s the idea of what do you do if your child is accused of a crime.
“I suppose it came under the spotlight a lot on TV last year with Adolescence as well.
“Adolescence was fantastic and a lot of people were like, ‘This is groundbreaking, we’ve never seen something like this on TV before’ but I would say at least six crime novels I read last year also dealt with that idea of children or adult children who have done something heinous so I think crime writers have been worrying about this for a very long time.”
A number of books of yours such as All Her Fault, No One Saw a Thing and Hide & Seek deal with children going missing or possibly being kidnapped. With Such a Nice Girl it is two 24- year- old women who are missing. It’s clearly a set up that really interests you..
“It does and again that’s kind of the anxiety I would have had- not anxiety, maybe that’s too strong a word but I’ve got this thought process that I had when my kids were small, ‘What if they go missing in the playground but you don’t find them again two minutes later as you usually do? What if she’s not there at the play date and it’s not just a mix up?’
“Someone asked me on a podcast the other day with all the ‘what if?’ scenarios am I a very anxious person and the thing is I’m not, I’m probably the opposite because I think sort of scoping it out in my head in any given situation it pushes away the anxiety so I kind of go, ‘Oh my god, but what if she didn’t come home from that night out?’
“Or, ‘What if?’ and then I run it through in a kind of a very analytical way in my head and it’s a little bit of a reverse tempt fate or a magical realism way to make it not happen if that makes any sense at all. I don’t know if it does.”
Your books also often show how quickly an unsuspecting person’s world can fall apart. At the start of this story everything is right in Siobhan and Grace’s world until they realise that Re and Luna are missing..
“Yeah, exactly and you know when you hear the terrible stories on the news, they are very often those in the moment things where things just fall apart.
“I think you can’t help looking to see context in the awful news stories.
“It’s not a victim blaming but a kind of a need to know, ‘Well, okay, did the person walk into the scary forest in the middle of the night all alone?’
“It’s like we need to know that they did something we wouldn’t do and very often they’re just ordinary people living their lives and something terrible happens and it’s that psychological suspense, domestic noir type books, that’s what they’re dealing with is the everyday awfulness.”
There is often a secret, buried for many years or even decades, that comes to light as well..
“Yeah, I guess that’s kind of crime fiction in a nutshell there, isn’t it?
“It’s secrets coming to light.
“I do love reading crime.
“My whole reading childhood was crime of all sorts starting with Enid Blyton and moving on to Agatha Christie, read a lot of American serial killer fiction, went through a horse racing phase.
“I can’t remember the name of the author now but he used to write these horse racing detective novels.
“But I’ve always been really interested in books about secrets and I will keep turning the pages to find out what that secret is so I think that whenever I started writing books myself, it was inevitable that it was going to be books about people keeping secrets and then unpeeling the layers to discover the secrets.”
Your story is interesting in that you came to writing relatively late after working for a long time in financial services and only really pursued it after a surprise redundancy, isn’t that right?
“Yeah, I was working in financial services and I was there for 17 years. Loved it, very happy in my job.
“Loved a spreadsheet or an email and I would absolutely still be there if the company didn’t restructure and close their Irish office. I had the option to move to Luxembourg or India or take redundancy so I was looking very much to try and find another job in financial services.
“I went to see a career coach and she said to me, ‘Close your eyes and visualise what you would be doing if you were in your dream job’.
“And I had started blogging at that point.
“I loved blogging and I said, ‘I’d be writing for a living, that would be my dream job’.
“And she said, ‘Okay, then let’s make that happen’.
“I gave her all the reasons why there was absolutely no way that could happen and she was amazing, she just unpicked all my arguments one by one and that was the start of the new career.
“I decided to take six months to see if I could maybe go freelance writing.
“At that point I wasn’t thinking I could write a crime novel, that seemed like a very daunting task that didn’t even cross my mind but I was hoping to move to freelance writing for newspapers and magazines because I had already done a bit of that through the blog.”
So there was no grand plan? You wouldn’t have seen yourself here with nine books and even more accolades to your name as you have now?
“Good God no.
“I really mean it when I say I thought writing a book seemed like a thing that other people might do but it seemed like a crazy amount of work and not something I would be able to do.
“It was actually something I was nudged into again.
“A bit like my career coach saying ‘visualise what you would be doing’, I had someone comment on my blog page one night, ‘You should write a book’ and I literally started writing it the next day because that was the nudge that I needed to give that a go.”
Last year All Her Fault was adapted into a great series starring Sarah Snook, that must have been a pinch yourself moment..
“Oh my gosh, yeah.
“That was probably the most pinch me moment of all the things that have happened so far.
“I got a phone call from my agent one night about two years ago saying, ‘Look at your email’.
“And then I looked at the email.
“I saw that Peacock, who are NBC’s streamer in America, had commissioned All Her Fault to be made and to go straight to an eight part series which was incredible in itself because usually they will commission a pilot, see how that goes and then take it from there about whether or not they can write an entire series so I feel like I was really lucky that it got commissioned to go straight to series.
“It was amazing.
“One of the best experiences of my life.”
You must have been happy with the end result..
“Yeah, I loved it and I feel really lucky because honestly I thought it was magnificent.
“I just loved every bit of the end result and a friend of mine said to me after she saw it, ‘This is really prestige TV’ and that’s a word that really resonated with me after I had seen it as well.
“I feel really lucky that it turned out so well.”
Such A Nice Girl reads very visually, is there any particular actresses that you can imagine as Siobhan or Grace?
“A person I would love to be Siobhan would be Aubrey Plaza.
“Now Aubrey is too young to be Siobhan but TV takes time.
“If it ever gets there, maybe Aubrey Plaza will be the right age but I think she’d be brilliant.
“And Staying with White Lotus, I think Michelle Monaghan would be amazing as Grace.
“Those are two people that I have in mind.”
Who would you imagine being Re and Luna?
“For Re there is an actress Mia McKenna- Bruce who’s in (Agatha Christie’s) Seven Dials.
“For Luna I think at one point in the book it mentions her Sabrina Carpenter hair so I think we’ll just go with Sabrina Carpenter.”
London features in Such A Nice Girl as Ré and Luna are based there and your previous book No One Saw a Thing about a child going missing on the London underground is all in London, have you spent a lot of time in London?
“Yeah, I would often visit because my publisher is in London and I’ve been there a good bit over the last five years and I’m just fascinated by London: The size of it, the busyness of it.
“I love the tube network.
“I just think it’s incredible.
“It’s always funny when we’re over there that people who are from London- I’m sure you can see both sides of this- are a bit cross because a tube is a couple of minutes late and we’re coming over from Ireland going, ‘Good God, we have the Dart with two lines, that’s all we’ve got in Dublin’ whereas the tube has obviously a lot more going on.
“I love London.
“With No One Saw A Thing the reason it was set in London really is because it just made more sense.
“It wouldn’t be so easy to get lost in Dublin on a DART, it had to be London.”
The Irish crime writing scene is buzzing now with writers like yourself, Jane Casey, Liz Nugent, Catherine Ryan Howard and Jo Spain to name a few, is it a really exciting community to be part of?
“It is.
“We’re all friends.
“You just listed my friends there and we all hang out together, we see each other at launches and festivals and we just need each other because it’s kind of lonely just being at home writing away every day at your laptop with no one to talk to, so it’s really just cathartic for us to get out to a face to face public event where you can go to the bar afterwards with your crime writing buddies and talk about all the good bits and the bad bits.
“I just think we’re really lucky.
“It’s a golden age of Irish crime writers, especially Irish women crime writers, and I just feel really lucky that I get to be part of it.”
Can you put your finger on any reason why Ireland has such a wealth of female crime writers now?
“It’s an interesting question and I’ve heard lots of different answers.
“I’ve heard lots of people say when they’re asked this at festivals or in interviews that it may be something to do with the kind of culture that we had up until the late 90s: The church had so much control. People were living in fear of authority, afraid to step outside the lines especially in anything that would have been seen as being socially unacceptable.
“Maybe it’s something about that.
“I think there’s also a ‘rising tide lifts all ships’ type thing going on as well.
“If you see another Irish woman who’s kind of similar to you and the same age as you and one minute she’s working in a different job and the next minute she’s a crime writer, you kind of go, ‘I wonder could I do that?’
“I suppose when I was a kid growing up reading Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie, they weren’t people I could necessarily relate to so I read their books without thinking too much about them as people whereas today you can look at Instagram.
“I think that’s such a new phenomenon, you couldn’t have done that in the past.
“I know when I was starting out I did start going to events, following authors on social media and that helped me kind of go, ‘Actually maybe ordinary people can do this’.
“So the more Irish women crime writers there are publishing novels, the wider the tap is for more and more people to do it.”
Such A Nice Girl by Andrea Mara is out now on Bantam Press.
